The retirement of Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell is an opportunity for the civil service to review leadership across Whitehall and develop a more powerful sense of corporate direction
In an early episode of Yes, Minister, Jim Hacker is astonished to find 23,000 staff in the ‘very small’ Department of Administrative Affairs and demands a time and motion study to see who he can get rid of. Sir Humphrey replies that the department conducted just such a review the previous year, which resulted instead in hiring an extra 500 people.
This may be the stuff of comedy but it resonates with a common conception that the Sir Humphreys of the civil service will always find a way to avoid cuts.
This time is different and in its recent report, Change in Government: the agenda for leadership, the Public Administration Select Committee (Pasc) shines a light squarely on the critical, but all too often neglected, agenda of civil service reform.
The central charge levelled against the government is that while it embraces the idea of change, it ‘fails to recognise the scale of reform required’ and has a worrying ‘antipathy’ to producing any form of plan to guide reform.
The pertinent questions Pasc has posed are: can departments succeed individually in their change programmes without central direction and, more widely, what are the consequences for the civil service as a whole from this major set of changes?
The scale of the challenge is enormous. In the Spending Review, the government committed to reducing administrative budgets for departments by a third: the biggest reduction since demobilisation following World War II.
But it is also clear that departments are making rapid progress and are a significant way down the track. According to the Office for National Statistics, core Whitehall departments have already reduced their headcount by over 4,000 full time equivalent posts (or 8.7%), with some departments (Communities and Local Government, the Home Office and Business, Innovation and Skills) having taken out between 15% and 20%. This compares with an average reduction of 3.2% across the wider public sector.
For individual departments then the risk is less that they will fail to make the administrative savings required. The more likely scenario is that departments hit their targets but key capabilities are lost or downgraded resulting in policy priorities slipping or not being met.
The biggest danger though is that each department approaches downsizing according to its own immediate priorities without regard to what this means for the civil service as a whole.
Pasc question whether the right leadership exists to drive change. As the report notes, Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office, was clear in his evidence that he preferred ‘doing stuff’ to developing a plan or blueprint. And the Open public services white paper published in July sets a radical agenda for public service delivery but does not begin to articulate what this means in practice for the civil service.
The broad political direction around the Big Society and radical decentralisation of power is clear enough, however, and is unlikely to be articulated in more concrete terms directly in relation to the civil service. Moreover, political leadership can be like the third rail to the civil service. Directed appropriately, it can provide the crucial spark and drive for change. But it is also a potential hazard as short-term political exigencies can easily conflict with the long-term needs of an effective civil service.
Alongside political drive, what is needed is stronger leadership within the civil service. This is about more than asking the Cabinet Office to monitor arrangements in individual departments. It requires greater collective leadership from the most senior leaders across Whitehall, supported by a strategically focused Cabinet Office.
Corporate leadership has not traditionally been a strength of the civil service. There are obvious reasons for this: permanent secretaries are ultimately accountable to their ministers, and to parliament as accounting officers, rather than the Cabinet Secretary. Developing a more powerful sense of corporate direction and responsibility at the heart of the civil service would go a long way to making possible the kind of leadership that can provide the necessary vision and focus across the civil service.
With the recent announcement of personnel and structural changes at the top of the civil service – as Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell prepares to retire – this seems an obvious and vital issue for the new triumvirate to grasp.
James Page is senior researcher at the Institute for Government
